The Fortunate Ones

As I stumbled upon the main page today, I saw the blue posts from WoW recently released about botters. It makes me so overjoyed that we won't have to worry about inconveniences like these, and that A-Net can spend their money and time more effectively than paying customer service members to construct ways of stopping bots. Instead, they just make it unnecessary to bot in the first place.

Yes, people may still bot to farm while they're sleeping, even if they're not stealing other people's nodes, but something tells me the appeal won't be as high. The economy won't be affected as much due to the larger server capacities, and money won't have quite the same value as it does in most other MMOs.

Are there any other systems you've found that A-Net is changing to help prevent player frustration or use their own time and money more wisely than other companies?

Nothing in particular I can think of, but I'm just so excited for the game ;_:

I heard CBT was coming to an end kinda shortly, as well . I also saw the post about botters and can't really see an issue with any if there does happen to be some. I never had many issues in WoW with botters for that matter.

Combat isn't very bot friendly. Also botters get sidekicked lower level if they attempt to farm low level events and dynamic events cant be farmed in one spot as these don't re-spawn soon as its over.

Not sure about gathering details, but I do suspect that gathering nodes won't re-spawn anywhere near fast as they do in wow since these don't have to re-spawn for other players who are gathering in area. Personally I hope something like 1day re-spawn + more random locations, so it would encourage players to move to different areas to gather resources rather than circle one area.

There will be bots for GW2 for sure, but its not gonna be as easy for them being made as they are in WoW. Not to mention they wont be that annoying as they are in WoW.
Current WoW bots are amazing I have to admit that, thats why its so hard to see them banned. I personally dislike that one big banhammer over constant banning. Why bother "tracking" them if you can just buy yourself one and set it up on internal server and see how it works, would be much more effective than blindly monitoring "reported" players for weeks/months. I mean how hard is it to make a tool that would check for way points (coords) the bots use etc for a while and then just auto-ban if it remains the same. Human being wont be able to fully reproduce same movement as a bot does when it farms for hours.

There will be bots for GW2 for sure, but its not gonna be as easy for them being made as they are in WoW. Not to mention they wont be that annoying as they are in WoW.
Current WoW bots are amazing I have to admit that, thats why its so hard to see them banned. I personally dislike that one big banhammer over constant banning. Why bother "tracking" them if you can just buy yourself one and set it up on internal server and see how it works, would be much more effective than blindly monitoring "reported" players for weeks/months. I mean how hard is it to make a tool that would check for way points (coords) the bots use etc for a while and then just auto-ban if it remains the same. Human being wont be able to fully reproduce same movement as a bot does when it farms for hours.

Part of the watching is not just to analyze the bot program itself but to try and catch the accounts the botter is sending materials too. I'm sure wow does buy copies of the boting programs to break them not just reverse engineer the behavior from watching in game. However whats going to hurt the gold sellers more? Baning an account thats probably compromized and being used to farm or catching the accounts they are useing to store and redistribute the materials? I think they do ban accounts quite frequently but they dont tell us anything so all we here are the forum complaints of seeing the same botter for a week. I'd be much happier with wow if they did a weekly posting of the number of accounts banned and a rough breakdown of why (boting, gold selling, gold buying, bad behavior) would have gone a long way to showing they were doing something and possibly discurage folks from doing some of that shit.

Back on topic though I think they will still have to stomp on bots to some extent. As long as players can trade there are going to be things folks want to buy and will buy/barter for. That creates an economy and folks will do whatever they can to exploit that. Even in GW1 where a farming bot did not interfear with another player's ability to get items it still impacted the economy of the game and Anet did do some rounds of baning accounts over it. There are factors that will make botting harder and less profitable than in wow but with as clever as the wow bots have goten it wont surprise me if someone whips one up after a while.

unfortunately the way an MMO works is that it requires time investment and some sort of economy.. if there's no materials or.. substance of value that has to be collected for.. well.. whatever.. there will never be any kind of economy or reason to interact with other players outside of killing things.. unfortunately this will be the downside to the combat system too.. you will always have those people who just kinda idle in the area in order to get dragged along while everyone does the actual work..

you can also look at it this way.. botters are a measure of the worth of the game.. people won't bother creating bots if they don't think they can profit from it.. so.. if GW2 sucks.. no bots! if GW2 turns out to be awesome.. there will be bots!

As long as there is in game currency or anything that can be bought in game, there will be botters. Believe me when I say these, account hackers are far more destructive than botters, and hacked accounts are where 98% of the bought gold in WoW comes from, NOT botters.

I'm hoping that, if what I read about the GW2 economy and marketplace being cross-server is actually correct, this will also limit the scope of bots.

Essentially I hope that it will create an oversupply. Also, the more advanced bartering system (being able to place orders for a set price on the marketplace) should help drive down prices. Thus bots.
Wow seems to me to be seller driven.
I think the GW2 devs are trying to limit this through various means.

I suppose what I was thinking of was the.. oh, what is it... Valor(?) system you take part in from taking part in DEs. Won't many things be bought with this currency rather than plain cash? I'm sure there will be just as many botters, but the point I'm getting that is that I don't think straight gold currency will be worth as much or be viable for as many items as it is in other MMOs like WoW. Therefore, not as many people will want to buy from bots, and there will be a smaller number (although definitely not none at all) of them.

Furthermore, if my theory holds true regarding the currency difference, botters will be less annoying in auction houses (I know they're probably called something else in GW2, not sure of the exact term).

Long long time lurker here making a first post, and a big thank you to all who've made the GW2 forums a great read and source of information! Simply cannot wait to get my hands on this game!

I agree that there will be bots in GW2, they will have some effect on the economy. Thanks, though, to some brilliant design work from ArenaNet, I think the impact of bots on your collection/gathering activities will be near none at all - this mainly from the fact that I've heard gathering nodes - a common target of botting systems - spawn for all players, not on a "first come first served" basis as in many other games.

It remains to be seen how much gathered materials, and gold coin actually "matter" in the game, to determine what effect gold farming and botting will have on the overall economy. By this, I mean that if a fair percentage of the good, high level rewards are only obtainable via currencies or points one can earn by participation (say in Dungeons or Dynamic Events), then the "value" of gold and perhaps other farmed materials is diminished, and the potential market for these items and currencies is considerably smaller. I don't know enough of the details of GW2 to understand whether or not this is the case, but I certainly hope it is!

Long long time lurker here making a first post, and a big thank you to all who've made the GW2 forums a great read and source of information! Simply cannot wait to get my hands on this game!

I agree that there will be bots in GW2, they will have some effect on the economy. Thanks, though, to some brilliant design work from ArenaNet, I think the impact of bots on your collection/gathering activities will be near none at all - this mainly from the fact that I've heard gathering nodes - a common target of botting systems - spawn for all players, not on a "first come first served" basis as in many other games.

It remains to be seen how much gathered materials, and gold coin actually "matter" in the game, to determine what effect gold farming and botting will have on the overall economy. By this, I mean that if a fair percentage of the good, high level rewards are only obtainable via currencies or points one can earn by participation (say in Dungeons or Dynamic Events), then the "value" of gold and perhaps other farmed materials is diminished, and the potential market for these items and currencies is considerably smaller. I don't know enough of the details of GW2 to understand whether or not this is the case, but I certainly hope it is!

Welcome and well, I imagine things like these to be purcheased through gold: crafted weapons & armors, crafted jewels, gathering resources (ores, ingredients, etc) and consumables.. perhaps a few things more, but the good thing about gw2 is that you'll still be able to purchease armor, weapons and even perhaps crafting materials, using karma points (from DEs) and tokens from dungeons...just that they'll be different looking.

Also, ArenaNet has prepared or is preparing rough measures against bot programs, just that they won't tell which are those measures, for safety reasons. Source:

Gw2Italia: What are you planning to do to discourage the spreading of bots?
EricFlannum: Discouraging the use of third party programs that exploit the game and negatively impact the experience of others is a top priority for us. As always, for security reasons, we cannot discuss the measures we are taking to combat botting, because such information could be in turn used by game exploiters to their advantage.

I am a former WoW player. But i never really had alts. I always had just one character. My main issue with making an alt was the grind of lvling. The system i like the most is the way you lvl up. Its literally never the same experience. I cant wait to see how well this works.